(Most of these quotes and excerpts are from Noonan’s book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, 1994.)

Affluence detaches.  It removes you from the old and eternal, it gets you out of the rain.

“The other day I met with a Chinese dissident who has served time in jail, and whose husband is in jail in Beijing.  I asked her if the longing for democratic principles that has swept the generation of Tiananmen Square has been accompanied by a rise in religious feeling – a new interest in Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity.  She thought for a moment, and looked at me.  “Among the young, I would say our religion is money,” she said.  I nodded, and said, “Oh, that’s our religion too.”

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen. 

Hypocrisy is one traditional value our society might reconsider reembracing.  Old America was full of grown-ups who were wonderful hypocrites.

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage. 

The worst thing about what is called the homeless situation is that people are living in the cold and damp of the street.  The second worst thing is how it corrupts the people who walk by, making believe that they don’t see, making believe that they don’t hear what is being said to them, playing the heavy in the movie of their mind as they shake their head no.

...an average Hollywood hit is an Oh shit! movie.

That old friction – the one between the genuine society and the genuine artist – made for great art.  There was no Ulysses without an angry Irish populace to inspire and ban it.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover had power because everybody ran from the printing press screaming, “A dirty book, a dirty book!”

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

Memory is a trickster, moments fade, what grows more vivid with time is interpretation.

And most of us know something else: in an age when politics is everything, people will do anything.  They will have no scruples, no compunction, no remorse.

A thought: good people are always at a disadvantage in the world because to be good is to be honest and the honest feel the weight of their misdeeds.  Real bad guys don’t, or not often, or not consistently, or not much.

If everyone lived as Christ asked, Communism would have no converts but the devil.

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